“This: You ought to be fair to her. I know you’ll forgive my mentioning anything so vulgar, but it is—about money. She can’t be expected to think of such things herself just now,”—there were whole honeymoons in the reasonable little nod Amory gave, “—and so I mention it. It’s my place to do so. For us all just to dip our hands into a common purse doesn’t seem to me very satisfactory. She’s rights too that I shouldn’t dream of disputing. And don’t think I’m assuming more than there actually is. I only mean that I don’t see why, in certain events, you shouldn’t, et cetera; that’s all I mean. You see?... But I admit that for everybody’s sake I should like things put on a proper footing without loss of time.”
Cosimo had begun to wander up and down among the saddlebag chairs. His slender fingers rested aimlessly on the backs of them from time to time. Amory thought that he was about to try the remaining notes within the compass of his voice, but instead he suddenly straightened himself. He appeared to have come to a resolution. He strode towards the door.
“Where are you going?” Amory asked.
“I’m going to fetch Britomart,” he replied shortly. “This is preposterous.”
But again he hesitated, as perhaps Amory surmised he might. His offer, if it meant anything, ought to have meant that his conscience was so clear that Amory might catechize Britomart to her heart’s content; but there had been those hair-strokings and hand-pattings, and—and—and Britomart, as Amory had said, was “not always making a display of her cleverness.” She might, indeed, let fall something even more disconcerting than the rest—
Cosimo was trying a bluff.
In a word, between fetching Britomart and not fetching her, Amory had her husband by the short hairs.
She mused.—“Just a moment,” she said.
And then she rose from the footstool, put one hand on the edge of the mantelpiece, and with the other drew up her skirt an inch or two and stretched out her slipper to the log.
“It really isn’t necessary to fetch Britomart,” she said after a moment, looking up. “Fetch her if you prefer it, of course, but first I want to say something else—something quite different.”